Last Wednesday I came home from work exhausted and in a bad mood. The only thing to do for me in those cases is to have some alcohol, and medicate by watching TV or listening to music. I ended up watching a rerun of Futurama, a series that the creator of The Simpsons made years ago. It has something of a cult following among nerds, but I’ve only seen it a couple of times. The episode turned out to be very good, but especially, at the end, there was a song that stuck in my head, and I had to listen to it again.

I immediately went on the internet, and with a couple of searches found what I was looking for. It was funny to see that a decent amount of people had been looking for the same song after having seen the same Futurama episode, and there was a forum page where someone had given the name of the group. I immediately bought it in electronic format from Amazon, and listened to it many times in a row. By the time I went to bed, I was in great spirits.

This is not the first time I’ve found music this way. I also have some songs that I discovered from commercials, and of course, a sizable portion of my collection comes from film soundtracks. Another sizable portion comes from browsing in Amazon to see what people with similar tastes were buying. I have also discovered some groups thanks to friends; notably, Anthony introduced me to British electronica.
I don’t think I have any songs that I discovered through the radio. Perhaps one or two. Aside from a brief period during teenage, I’ve never much listened to the radio or watched MTV, so that explains that, but my point here is that I have a large collection of music, and it didn’t come from the radio. I wonder if that is very unusual.

But back to the song, it’s “Baby Love Child” by the Japanese group Pizzicato Five, and you can listen to it below, courtesy of YouTube. The video shows frames of the Futurama episode.
To give you some background: Turanga Leela, the girl with one eye, has grown up never knowing her parents. Everybody, herself included, thinks she’s an alien. At the end of the episode, she finally meets her parents, and it turns out they’re human mutants from the sewers, and they had decided to leave her in the human world, in a crib, with a note in alienese [sic] so humans wouldn’t suspect her origins, and would give her a good upbringing. The sequence in the video shows how the parents always kept an eye on her from a distance, not wanting to be uncovered, but leaving her birthday presents, and looking out for her. Here it is: